Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.Program in Epithelial Biology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

Defining the tree rings of T cells

T cell function declines with age. What does T cell aging look like at the molecular level? By generating genome-wide maps of chromatin accessibility in CD8 T cells from young and elderly individuals, Moskowitz et al. have furthered our understanding of transcriptional programs that regulate T cell differentiation and aging. They report that in naïve CD8 T cells in the elderly, promoters that recruit nuclear respiratory factor 1 (NRF1), a transcription factor that controls expression of mitochondrial proteins, are less accessible and propose that loss of NRF1 binding contributes to lower metabolic activity of aged T cells. The transcriptional circuits uncovered here set the stage for the designing rationales to modulate T cell function in the elderly.